~ the illustrated garden studio blog

Tag Archives: recycling

Did you have a favorite stuffed animal when you were a child? I did. Actually, I still do. Mine was a tall, slim stuffed cat who now sits on the corner of my drawing table. He’s nearly 50 and all his fur was rubbed off long ago. He has one serene green glass eye left, and he leans to one side. But he’s been a faithful friend since I was four years old — and came out of retirement to befriend my daughters when they were small — so that makes him absolutely beautiful to me.

Just in time for Christmas, I’m giving away a wonderful stuffed kitty by Sweet Paisley Studio. Handmade with cleverly upcycled fabrics and block-printed features, this cutie will delight the cat lover on your holiday gift list. (I particularly like those long, stripey legs.)

Leave a comment below to be entered in the drawing — be sure your comment links back to your blog or email so that I can notify you if you win. Selection will be made this Saturday, Dec. 17 by www.random.org. Good luck!

I have always worked with messy forms of art — printmaking and clay — that are unwise to attempt inside your home. So, over the years, an assortment of outbuildings served as my workspaces: a pumphouse, a carport, even a chicken house. Now I have three wonderful, sunny rooms in an old wooden house. It feels very luxurious.

My printmaking supplies are in the kitchen. These old wooden candy boxes make a great place to display old printing blocks; the painting on top is by Fairhope artist/designer Patti Miller.

The back porch is enclosed to create a peaceful spot with three large north-facing windows. It’s a perfect spot to read, to meditate or to teach small-group drawing classes. I keep an easel tucked in the corner, but it’s mostly for the use of company, since I seldom paint in oils or acrylics.

The largest room houses the clay studio. The long table gives me room to lay out big wall panels or dry freshly rolled slabs. The adjustable steel shelving is from a restaurant supply store.

I love to find new uses for “rescued” materials. This old refrigerator door makes a good magnetic bulletin board, and can be detached from the wall and carried to shows to serve as a magnet display.

Mark designed and built this rolling workbench with storage. It consists of two salvaged office file cabinets, some plywood, some canvas and four heavy-duty coasters. The stool came from a turn-of-the-century candy factory in New Orleans.

A strip of sheet metal and some recycled soup cans make a tool organizer. Each can has a magnet glued to the back, so I can grab the can and pull it right off the wall if I need to have it nearby while I’m working:

Early tomorrow morning, I’ll load my trusty etching press into the truck and head out on the first of 19 school visits to do printmaking with students at inner city schools. Over the next few weeks, we’ll save lots of scrap materials from an unhappy fate in the local landfill, and use it to create collographs instead. Bits of fabric, paper, textured vinyl, leftover ribbon… feathers, felt, pieces of worn-out straw hats… anything that can be glued to a cardboard square, rolled with printer’s ink and cranked through the press becomes eligible for a quick reclassification from “unwanted garbage” to “art supplies.”

In the sample print, the base is a throw-away scrap of mat board. The borders are ribbon, and the horse is made of cut-out paper scraps. His mane is a piece of a paper doily. The background patterns and the row of circles up one side are the result of drawing on the mat board surface with a sharp school pencil. A little ink, a spin through the press…

I need your trash. To be more specific, I need some of your trash, for a very good cause, if you live within a reasonable proximity to Mobile, Alabama.

Bright and early on Jan. 6, Iwill load up my trusty etching press for the first of 19 school visits. As part of a wonderful outreach program sponsored by the Mobile Centre for the Living Arts, I’ll work with 900 third-through-fifth-grade students as they create collograph plates, ink them and pull their own original prints on the press. Young artists learn about printmaking history, explore textures and form… and have lots of inky fun.

The wacky cousin of the block printing family, a collograph can be made by inking and printing practically anything that can be safely glued to a plate and cranked through the press. These things can be cut, torn, and arranged in interesting ways to create unique designs. For our purposes, that means we will need a large pile — a small mountain, really — of the following things:

feathers

textured ribbon scraps, from gift wrap or sewing

lace

bits of burlap, felt, corduroy or upholstery fabric

pieces of woven straw hats, straw purses or woven placemats

textured mat board

sandpaper

paper doilies or other paper cut-outs

coins or Mardi Gras doubloons

So, if you live anywhere in the Mobile-to-Pensacola area, and you have household trash that aspires to avoid languishing in the landfill by becoming art materials instead… please email me. Thanks!

I’m not afraid to admit it. I love compost. There’s an irresistible alchemy involved when you can start with garbage and end up with a wildly nutrient-rich substance that has been likened to Ghiradelli chocolate for earthworms.

We alternate our layers of leaves, chopped garden vegetation and coffee grounds — plus kitchen peelings and parings — between two large compost bins made of recycled construction lumber. The two of us, prodigious vegetable peelers and coffee drinkers, produce enough compostible material allow us an inch of top dressing on most of the garden, twice each year. I keep an eye on the pile as it cooks itself into readiness — it gets turned once, and then is periodically poked with a sharpened tomato stake to introduce air deep into the heap. It seems to progress best when it’s slightly damp.

Our parfait of decay includes: exhausted garden plants and weeds, hedge and grass clippings, piles of leaves collected from our neighbors, fruit and veggie peels, eggshells (rinsed and crushed up), dryer lint, coffee grounds, and a handful of garden soil now and then for a bacterial boost.

We don’t compost woody plant material or the thick stems of broccoli, synthetic fabric or its lint, meat or any cooked food scraps, plants with seed heads or plants that show signs of disease.

Our warm, humid climate helps speed the rate of decomposition. I have been assured that urinating on one’s compost pile is the ultimate accelerator, but — being an urban gardener — I lack the courage to use that technique.

Hector & Persephone never expected to find true love in the catnip patch.

Being a Pisces, Murdock was always polite and optimistic.

I love painting on the backs of old postcards. It’s fun working in a cozy 4×6-inch window, with old stamps and handwritten messages peeking through the color.

This week, I’ll be working on art for my Holiday Open Studio.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, the first of the fall garden broccoli matured. Nothing tastes better than tender, steamed broccoli carried straight from the garden to the stove. The Perfect Man drizzled a bit of lemon butter over the top — ahhhh. Heaven! Next week, the first round of cabbage will be ready. And the kale, sweetened by last week’s freeze, is growing faster than ever. Alas, a couple of 80-degree days last week caused the lettuces to bolt. (If at first you don’t succeed… plant, plant again.) And our cauliflower seems to be sulking, all leaves and no tasty center, while its neighboring veggies are happily producing abundant winter fare. Every gardening season has its little mysteries.

Take an online art class:

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